I cover science and public policy, environmental sustainability, media ideology, NGO advocacy and corporate responsibility. I'm executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project (www.GeneticLiteracyProject.org), an independent NGO, and Senior Fellow at the World Food Center's Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy at the University of California-Davis. I've edited/authored seven books on genetics, chemicals, risk assessment and sustainability, and my favorite, on why I never graduated from college football player (place kicker) to pro athlete: "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It". Previously, I was a producer and executive for 20 yeas at ABC News and NBC News. Motto: Follow the facts, not the ideology. Play hard. Love dogs.

The DNA Olympics -- Jamaicans Win Sprinting 'Genetic Lottery' -- and Why We Should All Care

Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It,” takes stock of the DNA London Olympics–where, as usual, African-descended athletes swept the running events while whites and Asians dominated in the water sports, field competition and strength events. What’s going on here?

Usain Bolt leads the Jamaican relay team to Olympic gold and a world record

Segregation was on display in London over the past two weeks–which, surprisingly, should spark no concerns and may even help educate us all about the wonders of human biodiversity. Let me explain.

Led by 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt, Jamaican men swept the sprinting events at the London Olympics. It was a stunning feat for the small Caribbean nation. But as part of a broader trend, it’s hardly surprising. Runners of West African descent are the fastest humans on earth.

For decades, a bushel of developing countries—Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Kitts, Barbados, Grenada, Netherlands Antilles and the Bahamas in the Caribbean and Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Namibia in western Africa, as single countries, have each produced more elite male sprinters than all of white Europe and Asia combined. Yet West African descended runners are laggards at the longer races.

Remarkably, the story of East African runners is the mirror image of the West African success story. While terrible at the sprints, runners from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Somalia, along with a sprinkling of North and Southern Africans, regularly dominate endurance running.

And if you are an Asian or white runner? Forgetaboutit.

Unlike the props and costumes required for, say, fencing, or the intense coaching demanded of gymnastics, running requires only that you lace ‘em up. Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila proved this quite memorably in the 1960 Rome Olympics, when—shoeless, coachless and inexperienced—he won the marathon.

Running is a natural laboratory for the science of sports. It’s empirically driven. There are winners and losers. No soft-headed sociological mumbo-jumbo allowed.

The fact is, over the past fifty years, as the barriers to competition, at least for men, have gradually eroded, and equality of opportunity has steadily spread to vast sections of once poverty-stricken Asia and Africa, one might have expected that running results would have become more democratic. The medal podium should look like a rainbow of racial equality, a United Nations of sports. But just the opposite has happened.

The trends are eye opening: Athletes of African ancestry hold every major male running record, from the 100 meters to the marathon. (Although these same trends hold for female runners, the pattern is more dominant among male runners. This analysis focuses on men because the playing field for them is far more level, as social taboos remain that restrict female access to sports in many parts of the world.) Over the last seven Olympic men’s 100-meter races, all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only two non-African runners, France’s Christophe Lemaire, who is white, and Australia’s Irish-aboriginal Patrick Johnson, have cracked the top 500 100-meter times. There are no elite Asian sprinters—or, intriguingly, any from East or North Africa.

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Surely the slave trade from centuries gone by needs to be acknowledged for its role in shaping the success of today’s African-Americans and Caribbeans on the track.

When Africans were taken from their native land to America and the Caribbean, it was the physiologically superior people who were targeted. The Africans who were – dare I say? – “faster, stronger, higher” were the ones who would bring the best price for slave-traders, so they were the ones taken from their homeland, and ultimately became the antecedents of most African-Americans and Caribbeans today.

Therefore, through the horrible practice of slave-trading and the “artificial selection” that entailed, today’s black Americans/Caribbeans are somewhat “genetically blessed”. Our social history has shaped (some of) our racial physiologies today.

While I understand why you put forth such a hypothesis, the evidence doesn’t really suggest that the Middle Passage and slavery in the US is a significant contributor to the performance of West African descended athletes. You could just as well make a case that the most docile blacks were selected. Moreover, the arduous trip across the Atlantic took the lives of well more than half of the human cargo, it’s believed. The survivors were not the strongest but the one’s who retained salt, as dehydration was rampant–possibly contributing to the high incidences of hyper tension in North American blacks. And most slaves lived in one and two person slave households, so there was no ‘selective breeding’ as some have suggested. So, although your theory ‘makes sense,’ I don’t believe it survives what history tells us happened.

It seems to me that you miss many things concerning athletics and sports in general. What about if you compared the average physique of a basketball player to that of a high jumper? And what about American football? Do the players resemble sprinters? Or do they resemble hammer throwers and wrestlers? Are 800/1500 m runners as tall and heavy as 5-10 km runners? What about if your readers were interested in these questions? Should they dare to ask or not? Well, they shouldn’t, because the ideological construction of TABOO could crumble like a house of cards.

Great questions. Not addressable in a short essay alas. But they were addressable in my book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It.” As for the “ideological construction of Taboo,” it has no ideology. It’s uncontroversial take on population genetics have been embraced by scholars as left as Steven Rose and by conservative racialists. It’s science 101. Evolution shapes patterned differences. Phenotypes are linked to genotypes. Ho hum.

What you are still missing is the fact that today’s athletics doesn’t represent top global talent. In fact, the level of international competition in some events is apparently hilarious. But to understand this, you would need to know some important anthropometric data that are much harder to collect than superficial anecdotes and stats from US sports.

That’s great that you’re not scared to acknowledge that racial differences are far more than superficial cosmetic differences, at least as far as physical attributes; but I bet you’re not willing to take the next logical step and admit that there are inherent anatomical differences in the brains, nervous and endocrine systems of the races, which cause a significant difference in the behavioral and intellectual attributes of the races.